The Mad Hatters

If anything makes a hatmaker's hair stand on end, it is a man who does not wear a hat--especially if he is the President of the U.S. Last week, fearing the national impact of John F. Kennedy's usual hatlessness, the hat industry set out to rescue the nation's impressionable young men (and itself) from the perils of bareheadedness. In an eye-catching, full-page ad in the New York Times appeared a huge portrait of a beatnik so snaggy--and hatless--that no rising young man could afford to look anything like him.

"There are some men a hat won't help," said the ad, sponsored "in the selfish interest of the hat industry" by the Hat Corp. of America. "If you look anything like the fellow in the picture, you can stop reading right now." Most men kept reading--except in Greenwich Village (the ad's model, a student, had been found there by the ad agency of Leo Burnett). The ad promised that a hat "can make the rough, competitive road between you and the top a little easier to travel," warned that most executives "prefer to hire men who wear hats."

As for John Kennedy, who traveled to the top without a hat, Bernard Salesky, president of the Hat Corp., had some advice. "We want to get Mr. Kennedy to wear hats," said Salesky. "He'll feel better in a hat, and he won't get head colds. A President shouldn't get head colds."

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